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1869–1879
The first physician the record seats in Osceola practiced there ten years and then carried his practice to Mishawaka.Batchelder, M.D., born in Clinton County, New York, 21 November 1833, son of Stephen and Polly Batchelder; graduated at the Keokuk College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1856; began practice at Greencastle, Iowa; and in March 1869 came to Osceola, Indiana, "where he remained ten years, except one year, which he spent in California. In April, 1879, he came to Mishawaka, where he has a good practice." He and his wife held 142½ acres of Penn Township land. He married first, in 1856, Rothilda Cole, by whom he had three children — Squire J., John H., and Rosey E. — and again in 1876 Mrs. Eliza Griffitts. The sketch's details matter to this section beyond the man: his is the standard nineteenth-century practitioner's course — an eastern birth, a western medical college, a practice built in a railroad village at the moment the village could support one, and removal to the larger town when it grew. Osceola's decade of Batchelder, 1869 to 1879, is the decade the place became a town in fact; the physician's arrival is one of its markers, and his departure for Mishawaka is the first recorded instance of the pattern this section keeps meeting — the township's care gravitating west.
Sources
- Chapman (1880), pp.